From the folks at Bang on a Can comes this interesting song cycle based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. As there were no notes whatsoever describing the piece in the album itself, I hereby quote and rely upon the composer’s own words from the Cantaloupe website:
“I started writing Van Gogh because of my total love and obsession with the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. I made trips to Holland and Southern France: Arles and St. Remy, to explore and get the vibe of the area. I started working on these songs in the late 1980s. I wrote Borinage first and used to sing it myself.
The piece developed into a theater work and a collaboration with a video artist, and the early presentations of the piece were called “Van Gogh Video Opera.” There were two complete original performances of the piece with video, one in Vienna and one in New York. There was a long lag between the early performances in the 1990s and Fall 2003, when the Crash Ensemble did it in Dublin without the video part, which I had eliminated. I re-orchestrated the piece for that performance, adding 3 instruments (cello, bass, piano). Alarm Will Sound played that version of the piece in New York in April 2005 at Merkin Hall after which, Alarm Will Sound suggested that we record the piece. I have always loved this work and Alarm Will Sound’s performance and recording is everything I could have dreamed of – funky, passionate, and precise.”
The work uses a lot of Philip Glass’s complex minimalism techniques in regards to rhythm, yet the piece is absent the same composer’s sense of structure. Gordon seems instead to take these varied texts from the painter at face value and imparts a definite emotional significance to them, resulting in melodic lines that often border on the obsessively distraught. The inclusion of hybrid techniques like fairly primitive sounding rock beats with a trap drum set (the kind you would hear from pop groups in the sixties) will have differing effects on listeners. Younger audiences may respond, especially those more current with the popular music scene, so I will have to defer to their judgment on this. As for me, I find much of it to be rather banal and simplistic. Art can be beautiful in simplicity, but simplistic is something else altogether and there is too much repetition and blandness about much of this score to hold the interest. However, there is an audience for this kind of thing, and if you are among them (minimalism, pop hybrid singing and unusual not-easily-categorized performance art), then this might be your cup of tea. The sound is very close and hard.
— Steven Ritter
